Just in case you're still not convinced...

[C]onsider Trump’s words in a town hall event during the primaries: “Somebody hits us within ISIS, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” Or the words of Trump’s spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, who also asked the unaskable on Fox News: “What good does it do to have a nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?”

Having spent five years of my life as a Minuteman III launch officer, and a year as an instructor teaching young officers how to run that weapon system, I’m equipped to answer the Trump campaign’s question. The very point of nuclear weapons is that they are never used. We have them to dissuade hostile powers from attacking us, and vice versa.

Deterrence, as this policy is known, has been the backbone of U.S. national security for decades. That a candidate for the highest office in the land needs this explained to him, not once but thrice, should give every voter pause.

During my years in the Air Force, I worked over 300 nuclear “alerts”—24-hour shifts 100 feet below the Wyoming tundra. I sat at my post believing, through both the Bush and Obama administrations, that the president was fundamentally rational and would never ask me to do my terrible duty. Not unless the country was in the direst of national emergencies.

With Trump as president, the young men and women who are assigned to our nuclear forces will have no such assurances.

62 comments:

One guy's opinion. If you accept his premise, one would conclude that nuclear war under Trump is less likely, as the launch control officers may disobey any launch order.

His premise, though, is that Trump is not rational, which is false. Trump is rational.

Democrats have been saying every Republican candidate for President is irrational, dangerous, idiotic, clumsy, and a war-monger since, oh, 1960. Democrats try to use fear to win, as they can't win on a rational examination of their proposed policies.

I suggest considering whether fear-mongering—no matter how rational-sounding—might doom your argument, for a simple reason: other people are better at it than you. Which other people? Those with massive success catering to enough of the US population to get them to follow you and vote for you.

What if instead, you were to examine the reasons why people might be very dissatisfied with the status quo, and made suggestions which are actually workable solutions? You realize, don't you, that a good chunk of Americans have children who will have worse lives than they did? Take a look at Robert D. Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. If you were to be constructive, instead of destructive (fear-mongering is destructive, regardless of its rationality), perhaps that would sway people away from Trump. On the other hand, you might reveal that Clinton's plans won't work, and stoke the fires of disrupting the status quo, no matter the danger.

You can only abuse/neglect the common person so much before [s]he fights back.

Let me borrow one of The Donald's signature phrases and say: believe me, folks, I understand the frustration. But the *reason* that your kids are going to have a worse life than you did is because the Republicans ever since Reagan have been feeding the nation a steady diet of lies, and enough people have bought these lies to allow the Republicans to turn them into enduring policy. Foremost among these is the Big Lie that rich people are "job creators" and so if you raise their taxes you will lose your job. The problem with trying to be constructive about this is that the American People have bought the Big Lie for forty years, despite the overwhelming evidence that it isn't true. Taxes on rich people are the lowest they have ever been. If cutting taxes on rich people created jobs we should be drowning in jobs. The unemployment rate should be a fraction of a percent. Wages should be skyrocketing. But the American people do not respond well to evidence and reasoned arguments. They respond to fear. I'm no fan of Hillary, but I'm still hoping that by pointing out that Trump actually poses an existential threat to the entire planet I might move the needle a little bit towards the lesser of two evils.

> But the *reason* that your kids are going to have a worse life than you did is because the Republicans ever since Reagan have been feeding the nation a steady diet of lies, and enough people have bought these lies to allow the Republicans to turn them into enduring policy.

So, no blame for the Democrates and no blame for the populace for accepting the lies? No analysis of propaganda which had been sold to US citizens in the decades before (Noam Chomsky has documented much of this)? Just blame the Republicans?

Now, I'm not trying to absolve the Republicans of nonsense. But it rather seems like you are scapegoating them, and history seems to show that scapegoating "the other party" is not a successful strategy. Perhaps that is true because the scapegoating is based on falsehood, or to be more precise, the models used in the scapegoating are woefully insufficient for the situation at hand.

Furthermore, your response would seem to deny the existence of Bernie. If the Democrates were nobly working for 'the people' while the Republicans were working against them, you would think that this election would have a strong Democratic candidate which a great number of the disenfranchised could get behind. But that doesn't seem to be the case. It's not clear that Hillary is less in the hands of big business than Republicans. If anything, I wonder if the Democratic strategy, as manifested in outcomes instead of described in rhetoric, is quite close to what you mentioned at a Dialogos meeting: the masses are kept just happy enough to not rebel.

Lest you look to Europe as superior, you might consider the following report from Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance. In a meeting about the Greek debt crisis, he was present when a prominent member of the Troika said, "Elections cannot be allowed to change the economic policies of any country." (Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky @ NYPL, 1:20:05) You realize how insane it is for the Troika to impose austerity, right? And yet, they're not Republicans the last time I checked. It is as if the problem has to do with domination of some humans by others, and that Republicans aren't especially talented at such domination. In fact, they might be especially bad at it.

> So, no blame for the Democrates and no blame for the populace for accepting the lies?

Why would I blame the Democrats? They have never accepted trickle-down economics.

The populace, sure, at least the ones who voted Republican. Ultimately, this mess is their fault.

> you are scapegoating them

Am I? The Republicans seem to me to deny reality much more than the Democrats do. They deny climate change. They keep insisting that lowering taxes on rich people will create jobs despite nearly a century of evidence to the contrary. The situation really does seem to me to be quite asymmetric. But as always: show me the evidence.

Yes, the Democratic establishment is deeply corrupt. But if I have to choose between corrupt or deluded I'll take corrupt.

> Why would I blame the Democrats? They have never accepted trickle-down economics.

Because the original topic is not "trickle-down economics", but that which has led to the current situation where both Democratic and Republican establishments are deeply distrusted by the voting public.

> The populace, sure, at least the ones who voted Republican. Ultimately, this mess is their fault.

It seems to me that one of the Democratic ideals ought to be empowerment of the populace, including teaching them how political power actually works, how to detect when politicians are lying to them, etc. Is there any evidence that they in fact have done this? The way to look for this is to compare those places where they've had more influence than Republicans, to those places where Republicans have had more influence than Democrats. What I want to know is the extent to which Democrats have empowered the voting public in reality, vs. in rhetoric.

> Republicans seem to me to deny reality much more than the Democrats do.

I'm not sure I care as much about truth and falsity in rhetoric as the total impact on the populace. And I really don't know if Republicans deny reality more than Democrats do; to really study this, we'd probably need to compare the predictions of Democrats vs. Republicans over the last 100 years. Part of that would include the beginning of intense government propaganda, which IIRC Noam Chomsky has said originated with liberal Democrats. We could also examine the validity of economic work done in academia, noting that academia is leaning increasingly liberal (chart, article); see this partial transcript of a discussion between former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky.

> Yes, the Democratic establishment is deeply corrupt. But if I have to choose between corrupt or deluded I'll take corrupt.

Well, I certainly haven't investigated this matter in-depth; indeed, I don't think there's a way for a single individual to do much investigation. Instead, we'd need some sort of system to track multiple contesting viewpoints, the extent to which they appeal to the same evidence vs. different evidence, etc. Some day I'd like to build such a system and inculcate the appropriate culture. In the meantime, perhaps you could look at the above transcript about the state of economics in academia, today. We can then ask whether perhaps Democrats are plenty deluded in that realm.

@Ron:The Republicans seem to me to deny reality much more than the Democrats do. They deny climate change. They keep insisting that lowering taxes on rich people will create jobs despite nearly a century of evidence to the contrary.

The Democrats insist on equating "climate change" with "we must spend trillions of dollars in a panicked effort to stop emitting CO2, and in the process create a cap and trade system that will do far more damage due to gaming the system than climate change will ever do" instead of "we must create more wealth so we can adapt".

The Democrats insist on judging equality by equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity; they are unwilling to admit that anyone can have a worse outcome than someone else because they actually didn't work as hard.

The Democrats believe that printing money will create jobs.

These are not the same delusions as the Republicans have, but they are still delusions; and the Democrats' delusions are worse because they have far more effect on public policy. The Republicans couldn't stop the EPA from regulating CO2 as a pollutant. They haven't been able to hold back affirmative action and "diversity" efforts for decades. They haven't even been able to get taxes reduced much, despite all their claims about job creation; instead, we have close to $3 trillion of quantitative easing for no real benefit that I can see.

> Because the original topic is not "trickle-down economics", but that which has led to the current situation where both Democratic and Republican establishments are deeply distrusted by the voting public.

No, the original topic was whether or not Donald Trump (who is running as a Republican BTW) can be trusted not to start nuclear war because someone got under his thin skin.

> It seems to me that one of the Democratic ideals ought to be empowerment of the populace, including teaching them how political power actually works

Yes, that would be nice, wouldn't it?

> I really don't know if Republicans deny reality more than Democrats do

It seems pretty clear to me. But then again, you and I do have at least on deep disagreement about what reality actually *is* so this shouldn't be too surprising.

@Peter Donis:

> The Democrats insist on equating "climate change" with "we must spend trillions of dollars in a panicked effort to stop emitting CO2, and in the process create a cap and trade system that will do far more damage due to gaming the system than climate change will ever do" instead of "we must create more wealth so we can adapt".

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Democrat's policy proposals are the best way to address the problem, but at least *they are addressing the problem*, not burying their heads in the sand and pretending the problem does not exist. It does.

> The Democrats insist on judging equality by equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity

No, the Democrats recognize the reality that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity are not independent of each other. A child of multi-millionaires is going to have, all else being equal, more opportunity than the child of a laid off factory worker.

> The Democrats believe that printing money will create jobs.

That's news to me. Where in the Democratic platform does is say that?

> These are not the same delusions as the Republicans have, but they are still delusions;

I don't think you understand what a delusion is. A delusion is not a policy position that one disagrees with. A delusion is something that someone believes to be a fact that is not a fact. "Climate change is a conspiracy" is a delusion. "Obama is a Muslim" is a delusion. "Raising taxes on rich people destroys jobs" is a delusion.

> and the Democrats' delusions are worse because they have far more effect on public policy.

The Republicans control both houses of Congress and a majority of state legislatures and a majority of governorships. They have 23 legislative trifectas (control of both houses and the governorship) versus the democrats 7. While Scalia was alive a majority of Supreme Court justices had been appointed by Republicans. How can Democrats possibly have more control over public policy?

@Ron:Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Democrat's policy proposals are the best way to address the problem, but at least *they are addressing the problem

That depends on what you think the "problem" is. Human activities affecting the climate is just an instance of human activities affecting everything--i.e., all actions have unintended consequences. The Democrats' policies don't seem to me to be any more directed at that problem than the Republicans'. The way to minimize unintended consequences is to minimize interventions, which means having the government do *less*; but both parties advocate the government doing more (just more of different things).

the Democrats recognize the reality that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity are not independent of each other.

The Democrats *say* they recognize this, but the actual effect of their policies since the 1960s has been to focus solely on equality of outcome and to assert that any inequality of outcome must indicate an inequality of opportunity. That is a delusion.

Furthermore, even if it's true that equality of outcome is connected to equality of opportunity, if equality of opportunity is the proper political goal (which I believe it is), then that's what we should be focusing on and measuring. We should not be focusing on and measuring equality of outcome and then excusing it by saying that it serves as a proxy for equality of opportunity.

Where in the Democratic platform does is say that?

I'm not judging parties by their platforms, because their platforms often don't express what politicians of the party actually do when they are elected. Democrats favor Keynesian economics much more than Republicans (who, to be fair, mostly don't have enough of an intellectual foundation to be said to "favor" any school of economics), which is the theoretical foundation of policies like quantitative easing.

How can Democrats possibly have more control over public policy?

Because they do--because public policy has, on balance, moved in the direction of the Democrats' goals, not the Republicans' goals. I agree this is not what one would predict based on the pattern of elected politicians; but that just means we have another case of a beautiful theory spoiled by an ugly fact.

Btw, none of this implies that allowing Trump to become their nominee is not an example of delusion on the part of the Republicans. It is. I just don't think that makes the Democrats any better. They happen to have the least insane candidate for President this time around, but that's a very low bar.

> Human activities affecting the climate is just an instance of human activities affecting everything

Sure, but climate change poses a fairly short-term existential threat to civilization. It is a clear and present danger in a way that nothing else is. You can't just sweep that under the rug with vague platitudes.

> The way to minimize unintended consequences is to minimize interventions

Ever since we invented agriculture, humanity has been nothing but one big intervention. You can't minimize interventions without giving up on civilization. You can only choose whether you want the decisions on how to intervene (or not) made by a democratic government answerable to all voters, or by corporations answerable only to their shareholders and their customers, i.e. people with money. Reasonable people can disagree over which is preferable. But again, Republicans are not engaging in that debate. Republicans are saying that climate change is *not a problem*. IMHO anyone taking that position forfeits their seat at the grown-up's table.

> the actual effect of their policies since the 1960s has been to focus

I'm sorry, but that is incoherent. The effect of a policy can't be to focus on something. The effect of a policy is something that happens in the world. Focus is something that happens in people's minds.

> quantitative easing

Aha, finally we get to the nub of the matter. Let is not forget why QE was needed: it's because Glass-Steagall was repealed (under a Democratic president!), which led to massive fraud in the banking sector, which led to a housing crash, which very nearly led to a sequel of the Great Depression. In other words, the root cause was the reduction in federal regulations, which is a policy position generally associated more with Republicans than Democrats.

The fact of the matter is that the reason we have all these rules and regulations is not because there is some mysterious force of nature that empowers bureaucrats to impose rules and regulations, it's because when we don't have them, Really Bad Things happen and people demand that Something Be Done.

>> How can Democrats possibly have more control over public policy?

> Because they do--because public policy has, on balance, moved in the direction of the Democrats' goals, not the Republicans' goals.

That's plainly not true. Taxes are at historical lows. The power of labor unions is at historical lows (and corollary of which is that wages are at historical lows). Inequality is at historical highs (despite the Democrats "focus on equality of outcome").

It's true that social issues have tended liberal, but that's just because conservatives are always wrong about social issues. This is not a new phenomenon. From slavery to women's suffrage to gay marriage, conservatives have historically been wrong about social issues 100% of the time. Quite a remarkable record, actually.

> They happen to have the least insane candidate for President this time around, but that's a very low bar.

The biggest terrorist threat is not from ISIS or Al-queda, it's from far right-wing Americans (such as churchgoers). That's who you need to fear.

Illegal immigration is not a security issue

Only racists oppose illegal immigration

An epidemic of rapes is occurring on college campuses due to a "rape culture."

Environmental PoliciesThe environment would be much better off if people just didn't exist

New electric generating plants don't need to be built--let's focus on conservation! [Although, perhaps they know something -- that Democratic economic policies will so destroy the economy that electricity demand will decrease]

Environmental regulations don't discourage new business creation.

Americans have been consuming too many resources and need to get used to using less.

Is your grass damp? That's a wetland.

Social PoliciesWe should respond to the outlandish expense of college educations by having the government pay more!

I disagree; I think climate change is happening but it's something that human civilization can adapt to fairly easily, just as it has throughout the history of said civilization. But we're certainly not going to resolve that here.

You can't minimize interventions without giving up on civilization.

I should have been more specific; I meant government intervention. Or more precisely, intervention by people who do not have to directly bear the consequences.

The effect of a policy can't be to focus on something.

Sure it can. Much of what is called "policy" is precisely about changing people's mindset--changing the terms of the debate. But this is really a question of terminology, not substance; I'm using the word "policy" more broadly than you appear to be.

Let is not forget why QE was needed: it's because Glass-Steagall was repealed (under a Democratic president!), which led to massive fraud in the banking sector, which led to a housing crash, which very nearly led to a sequel of the Great Depression.

You're assuming that QE is needed. What if it's not? What if it's part of the problem, rather than part of the solution?

Also, the repeal of Glass-Steagall was hardly the only government act that led to the crisis. Others include the Community Reinvestment Act and "affordable housing" mandates, which are what led to the large increase in the percentage of mortgages which were subprime. Those were increases in regulation, not decreases.

That's plainly not true.

I didn't say every single aspect of public policy has moved in the Democrats' desired direction. I said public policy on balance has done so. This is partly due to the different usage of the word "policy" that I mentioned above; you're looking at specific items, I'm looking at the overall mindset--where the "center" of the debate is taken to be.

Inequality is at historical highs (despite the Democrats "focus on equality of outcome").

The inequality is not a policy; it's a statistic. As you say, the intent of the Democrats' public policy has not been achieved. But that's not because that policy hasn't been tried. (Which to me means the increased inequality is strong evidence that the Democrats' public policy in this area does not work.)

conservatives are always wrong about social issues.

Are we talking about "conservatives" or Republicans?

At the time of the Civil War, which party supported slavery, and which party opposed it?

When the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, came to a vote in the Senate, which party filibustered to try to prevent the vote?

If one accepts the climate models and resulting forecasts, then future global warming is already locked in. I recently read a short interview with Mark Cuban. He made the point that since global warming is going to happen, we need to turn it into an opportunity.

I'm a statistician, among other things. I've read detailed critiques of the use of statistics by the global warming scientists. I've also read the National Academy of Sciences report on their work. Summarizing my evaluation of their skill in using statistics: "sophomoric".

The Current Election>Indeed. It is a sad state of affairs all around.

If one were to write a parody of a Presidential Election for a feature film, it would be what we're seeing now.

Maybe we are just simulations running in a computer.Get us out of the box, Ron.

"Over 650 economists, including five Nobel Prize winners and six past presidents of the American Economics Association, signed a statement stating that federal and state minimum wage increases 'can significantly improve the lives of low-income workers and their families, without the adverse effects that critics have claimed.'"

"Why it is that transferring money from businesses to low-wage workers does not disrupt the economy? A review of economic studies since 2000 on the effects of the minimum wage and the ways in which businesses adjust to wage increases found that the most important channels of adjustment are reductions in labor turnover; improvements in organizational efficiency; and small price increases. Given the relatively small cost to employers of modest increases in the minimum wage, these adjustment mechanisms appear to be more than sufficient to avoid employment losses, even for employers with a large share of low-wage workers."

> The environment would be much better off if people just didn't exist

That's true too. No other species pollutes like we do.

> future global warming is already locked in

The question is how much. There's almost certainly no way to avoid 2 degrees. There might still be a way to avoid 8. Civilization can survive 2 degrees. It almost certainly cannot survive 8. Somewhere in between those two numbers is a tipping point. No one knows exactly where.

> Get us out of the box, Ron.

Working on it.

@Peter Donis:

> I disagree ... But we're certainly not going to resolve that here.

There is nothing to resolve. The scientific consensus is clear. You are, of course, free to disagree with the science. Some people believe the earth is 6000 years old. Some people believe vaccines cause autism. In a free country you are free to believe false things.

Again, I disagree. Years of following this issue and digging into the details of various specific items has convinced me that what you are calling a "scientific consensus" is actually a political consensus masquerading as a scientific consensus. But again, we're certainly not going to resolve that here.

You are, of course, free to disagree with the science.

Or to refuse to accept the popular labeling of a particular set of claims as "science". You are right that, in most cases, when ordinary people do that, they are wrong and the "science" is right. But only in most cases. Not in all cases.

> No, the original topic was whether or not Donald Trump (who is running as a Republican BTW) can be trusted not to start nuclear war because someone got under his thin skin.

Point taken. But if we go one step toward the more fundamental level, the topic is "averting the election of Donald Trump". That's the level I was talking about. The matter of trickle-down economics is definitely above that level.

> > But then again, you and I do have at least on deep disagreement about what reality actually *is* so this shouldn't be too surprising.> Yes, that would be nice, wouldn't it?

The fact that it does not happen constitutes evidence that the Democrats are not as much for "the people" as they claim in their rhetoric. True, or false? If true, this doesn't mean that the Democratic elite are deluded, but it does mean either that, or that they actively deceive their constituents. We could then weigh the difference between 'deluded' and 'deceivers'.

> > I really don't know if Republicans deny reality more than Democrats do> It seems pretty clear to me.

How carefully have you looked, to ensure that your sampling is representative instead of e.g. dependent on the press? Here's an example of what seems like absolute delusion:

>> Asked by a Senate committee in 1966 how long it would take to end poverty in America, Sargent Shriver—President Johnson's point-man in the war on poverty—looked down at his notes, at his graphs and his figures, and said "about 10 years."[9] He meant it. (Tyranny of Reason, 251)

For another instance of delusion on the part of Democrats, how about the idea that nuclear power isn't safe (in comparison to coal, oil, and gas)? I wouldn't be surprised that if the West had been actively researching better and better nuclear designs at industrial scale, we could have exported that tech to China and India and greatly reduced the amount of climate change caused. For some solid data, see Democratic vs. Republican support of nuclear energy, 2001–2016. Democrats trailed Republicans in support of nuclear power by 9%–25% during that time period.

From admittedly spotty reading, nuclear energy is much less damaging to human health than fossil fuels, and much better for the environment. Scientific and technological progress has rendered the waste products of fission less and less scary. What I'm much more confident about is that the reasons people have been scared of nuclear power are in flagrant opposition to the evidence. For example, no nuclear plant design in the US is able to melt down like Chernobyl did. The radiation released by Three Mile Island was insignificant:

>> ... epidemiological studies analyzing the rate of cancer in and around the area since the accident, determined there was a small statistically non-significant increase in the rate and thus no causal connection linking the accident with these cancers has been substantiated.[8][9][10][11][12][13] (WP: Three Mile Island accident)

However, did allegedly science-respecting Democrats respect these facts? No. Those who did decided to engage in deception for political reasons:

>> (President Carter—who had specialized in nuclear power while in the United States Navy—told his cabinet after visiting the plant that the accident was minor, but reportedly declined to do so in public in order to avoid offending left-wing Democrats who opposed nuclear power.[87]) WP: Three Mile Island accident § Activism and legal action

@Luke:From admittedly spotty reading, nuclear energy is much less damaging to human health than fossil fuels, and much better for the environment.

I agree with this based on more than "spotty" reading (not to mention two degrees in Nuclear Engineering). The difference with nuclear energy is that the harms, when they happen (e.g., Chernobyl), are more concentrated than the harms from fossil fuels (e.g., coal dust causing respiratory issues). So it's easier to exaggerate the harms of nuclear energy.

Scientific and technological progress has rendered the waste products of fission less and less scary.

This is true, but even in the 1970's, fuel reprocessing technology could already render them much less scary than they were portrayed. France and Japan have been reprocessing for decades now. The US did not adopt that strategy because President Carter refused to (another bad call by him in addition to his handling of TMI, which you mention).

no nuclear plant design in the US is able to melt down like Chernobyl did.

Not just in the US, but anywhere in the world. Even the Russians don't design plants like that any more.

Furthermore, even accidents like Fukushima won't be possible with the plant designs that are now available (but weren't when Fukushima was built); current designs are entirely passively cooled on shutdown and don't require any backup power. (In fact, even a minor TMI-style accident is not possible with these designs.)

> > For another instance of delusion on the part of Democrats, how about the idea that nuclear power isn't safe > Yes! Absolutely!

Ok, I'm glad we can agree on that. Now, how do we estimate the magnitude of the harm which has been caused to the entire world by this delusion? For example, is it possible that China and India could be running on significantly more nuclear power and less fossil fuel power, had the US figured out how to drive down the costs of nuclear power? Could it be that there would be significantly fewer greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and significantly less dependence on Middle East oil, had Democrats not engaged in this delusion/​deception?

No rush on responding—I hope you know that I'm always in these discussions for the long haul. :-)

@Peter Donis:

> > From admittedly spotty reading, nuclear energy is much less damaging to human health than fossil fuels, and much better for the environment.

> I agree with this based on more than "spotty" reading (not to mention two degrees in Nuclear Engineering). The difference with nuclear energy is that the harms, when they happen (e.g., Chernobyl), are more concentrated than the harms from fossil fuels (e.g., coal dust causing respiratory issues). So it's easier to exaggerate the harms of nuclear energy.

Thanks. Yeah, I've run into the same problem with peopel who think that the atomic bombings were worse than the firebombing of Tokyo, even though the latter caused more deaths. The concentrated nature has a nonlinear psychological impact. But I'm pretty sure that we humans have figured out ways to counter this, if we desire it.

Thanks also for the rest of your comment as well. I look forward to Ron's response, analyzing just how grievous this Democratic delusion/​deception has been, in comparison to nonsense pulled by Republicans.

> I think climate change is happening but it's something that human civilization can adapt to fairly easily, just as it has throughout the history of said civilization

We agree on the big issue (climate change is happening) so I don't see any reason why the smaller issue (can human civilization adapt easily?) shouldn't yield to rational discussion. I think it's worth a try.

Let me try to convince you that you're wrong: in fact, human civilization has *not* adapted to climate change throughout its history. Human civilization only goes back about 5-10 thousand years, and the global climate over that period of time has been pretty stable. In fact, it seems plausible that it is this stability that allowed civilization to arise in the first place. A pre-requisite of civilization is the construction of physical infrastructure, and that's hard to do when glaciers and hurricanes keep coming and going.

Yes, we have had to deal with *local* variations in weather, and sometimes even climate (e.g. the little ice age) but human civilization has never faced climate change of the magnitude that we now face. The last time CO2 levels were this high was a few million years ago.

Do you disagree with any of that?

BTW, nothing would make me happier than for you to convince me that I'm wrong and that there isn't really a serious problem here. I'm a big fan of civilization, and so it's not like I enjoy contemplating its demise.

@Luke:

The issue of Democratic delusions needs a post of its own. Stay tuned.

> A pre-requisite of civilization is the construction of physical infrastructure, and that's hard to do when glaciers and hurricanes keep coming and going.

Heh, my wife and I just watched the Star Trek Voyager episode Blink of an Eye, where the starship Voyager causes occasional earthquakes on a planet it's trapped orbiting. The civilization on the planet does manage to build infrastructure, but they use 10x the iron of a "normal" civilization.

> The issue of Democratic delusions needs a post of its own. Stay tuned.

I look forward to it! I've never looked in-depth into hypothetical scenarios where the US didn't get its panties in a twist over nuclear power, but instead went forward whole-hog.

@Ron:Human civilization only goes back about 5-10 thousand years, and the global climate over that period of time has been pretty stable.

Stable compared to what? Compared to the previous ice age, of course it has been, yes.

But compared to the past century or so, no, we do not have the data to make that claim. Temperatures around 6000 years ago were at least as warm as today (possibly warmer, depending on whose reconstruction you believe). And we have no hard data at all about the frequency of extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes 5 to 10 thousand years ago. So we simply do not have a basis for claiming that the climate has been stable over that time period.

Just based on statistics, we would expect there to be more variation over 5 to 10 thousand years than over a century; the longer you sample a system, the wider a range of behavior you should expect to see. So a claim to the contrary would require strong evidence, and we don't have it.

it seems plausible that it is this stability that allowed civilization to arise in the first place. A pre-requisite of civilization is the construction of physical infrastructure, and that's hard to do when glaciers and hurricanes keep coming and going.

The physical infrastructure built by civilization *has* been destroyed by extreme events throughout human history. Humans' response has been to adapt--either rebuild or migrate--not to stop civilization.

Also, as technology advances, the ability of infrastructure to withstand extreme events increases. Our ability in this respect today is far beyond what anyone would have imagined possible a couple of centuries ago, let alone 5 to 10 thousand years ago.

human civilization has never faced climate change of the magnitude that we now face.

Again, this is a strong claim that we simply do not have the evidence to back up, and it contradicts basic expectations from statistics. See above.

Also, the fact that the "scientific consensus" continues to make this claim when we do not have the evidence to support it is one key reason why I don't trust it in this area.

The last time CO2 levels were this high was a few million years ago.

CO2 levels are not the same as climate. They are not even a proxy for climate in general; they are only a proxy for one possible effect on global average temperature, and even that correlation only exists on a short time scale, the past century or less. As noted above, temperature 6000 years ago was at least as warm as today, but CO2 levels were significantly lower.

As far as human effects on the climate go, I think land use is much more significant than CO2 emissions. For one thing, humans have been affecting land use for all of the history of civilization, if not longer; but we've only been emitting significant CO2 for a century or so. It's plausible that human effects on land use (mainly due to agriculture) have been a factor in extending the length of the current interglacial.

Does all of this mean we are certain that the current climate change is not a problem? Of course not, and I didn't say it wasn't. I said we could adapt to it, just as humans have been adapting to climate change throughout the history of civilization. Will that adaptation require effort? Yes, it will. Is it guaranteed to succeed? No--there are no guarantees in this universe. But it looks to me like a much better option than spending trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions, instead of, for example, using those resources to bring more people out of poverty. Trying to reduce CO2 emissions only benefits us if (a) it actually does reduce CO2 emissions (not by any means guaranteed--China and India don't care), and (b) CO2 emission reduction will in fact stop climate change (which it might well not--see land use, above). Bringing more people out of poverty benefits us all no matter what happens.

Bringing more people out of poverty benefits us all no matter what happens.

I should add that investing those same resources in alternative energy--my personal favorite would be nuclear, you can build a lot of nuclear reactors for a few trillion dollars--would also bring benefits no matter what happens. Fossil fuels do more environmental damage per unit of energy generated (and they're also a limited resource); and it would be really nice, for the US at least, if our foreign policy didn't have to take into account a pressing need for oil from the Middle East.

@Ron:I'm a big fan of civilization, and so it's not like I enjoy contemplating its demise.

As a separate point regarding this, I think you're underestimating the robustness of human civilization, particularly to changes which are not driven by intelligent agents. I am far more concerned about threats to civilization from human politics than from any inanimate cause, because human politics involves humans with direct motivations to undermine our current civilization in favor of some alternate vision of their own. The Earth's climate has no such motivations.

Oh, I agree. I don't think climate change is going to destroy civilization *directly*, I think it will apply pressures that our politics are unable to handle. A few years of back-to-back crop failures and things could get ugly.

> The physical infrastructure built by civilization *has* been destroyed by extreme events throughout human history.

Sure, but never all at once. Civilization easily withstands the occasional loss of a city here and a city there. But if the Greenland ice sheet melts then you lose all of the coastal cities on the planet at the same time. That would be unprecedented. That, on top of the sustained crop failures what would likely accompany such an event, could easily lead to armed conflict of a scale the world has never seen. Hundreds of millions of hungry people are extremely dangerous. And, of course, we have nukes now too. We can no longer rely on the laws of physics to limit our capacity for self-destruction.

> Also, as technology advances, the ability of infrastructure to withstand extreme events increases. Our ability in this respect today is far beyond what anyone would have imagined possible a couple of centuries ago, let alone 5 to 10 thousand years ago.

Agreed. But again, it's the positive feedback loops and the resulting speed of the changes that worries me: anthropogenic CO2 just kicks off the process. That initial warming leads to the thawing of permafrost which releases methane which causes more warming which melts the ice sheets which lowers the albido which causes more warming... In the worst case scenario we could lose Greenland in a few decades. (NOTE: I'm not saying this will happen in a few decades, I'm saying that once it becomes apparent that it's happening it can be complete in a few decades.) There is no way we could reconfigure the coast lines that fast.

> CO2 levels are not the same as climate.

Again, agreed. But there is a plausible mechanism by which high CO2 levels lead to catastrophe over time, and the fact that we're in uncharted territory with regards to CO2 levels means we can no longer rely on the past few thousand years a reliable indicator of what to expect in the future. Moreover, the time scales over which these things play out are long relative to human attention spans, and so by the time the question of whether or not this will lead to catastrophe has a clear answer it will almost certainly be much too late to do anything about it. Accordingly, I think it is prudent to err on the side of caution. We're playing for the highest stakes imaginable.

> Bringing more people out of poverty benefits us all no matter what happens.

That is certainly true. And it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Developing alternative energy sources can be as much a driver of economic growth as burning coal. So why not focus our attention on things that might solve both problems?

@Ron:I don't think climate change is going to destroy civilization *directly*, I think it will apply pressures that our politics are unable to handle. A few years of back-to-back crop failures and things could get ugly.

Hmm, ok, this is a different argument. But I don't think it justifies spending trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions, because this argument doesn't change the fact that we simply don't have the data to say that what we're seeing now is unprecedented, or to have confidence that a particular corrective action will work. See further comments below.

it's the positive feedback loops and the resulting speed of the changes that worries me

The positive feedback loops are speculative, particularly in the warming direction. There is more evidence for positive feedbacks and fast changes in the cooling direction--quick onset of glaciation. (I've seen some estimates that latitudes like that of Scotland could have gone from more or less like they are now to glaciers in a century or so.) And I think glaciation would be worse than any consequence anyone has dreamed up of warming.

The main warming event that I see discussed is the PETM, but the time scale for that was thousands of years (at least that seems to be the current best estimate). Also, the cause of the PETM is not known, although CO2 increase starting the process (and then the ensuing chain of events you describe) is of course one hypothesis that is in the running. And CO2 levels in the PETM started out at more than twice what they are now and about four times what they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution (at least with the estimates that I can find). So I'm not sure how much of a comparison it really is.

it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

Spending trillions of dollars on CO2 emissions reduction pretty much is mutually exclusive with the other options. That's one key reason why I'm against it: because if we're going to spend that much on anything, it should be on something that benefits everyone no matter what happens, not something that only benefits anyone if a certain hypothesis turns out to be right.

Basically, your argument seems to be that we should make huge efforts to reduce CO2 emissions on the outside chance that it will help, simply because any outside chance is better than nothing. My counter-argument is that we should focus on creating wealth so we can adapt, not redirecting existing wealth to attempts at mitigation. If nothing else: creating wealth is positive sum, whereas redirecting it is zero sum. And the only way out of the kind of political trap you are envisioning is to focus on positive sum. Focusing on zero sum amounts to putting people on notice that there will be winners and losers and they better fight to make sure they aren't one of the losers. That doesn't seem like a good strategy to me if your fears about political unrest and violence are warranted.

@Ron:on top of the sustained crop failures what would likely accompany such an event

As a separate point, I'm not sure agriculture globally would actually take a hit from warming; what would happen is that it would shift geographically. There is a lot of land in Canada and Russia that is just on the edge now, and would be much more productive in a warmer climate. I know "studies have shown" that this only happens for the first degree or two of warming, and then things get worse; but I don't think we have that accurate an understanding of what would happen. Which is another reason why adaptation looks to me like a better strategy.

This is somewhat oversimplified, since the sheet won't melt purely by heat flux to its surface; but it gives a reasonable order of magnitude number to compare with other heat flux numbers. What jumps out, obviously, is that this number is very large--roughly 500 times the averaged energy flux from the Sun to Earth (before taking into account albedo), and roughly 40,000 times the radiative forcing due to a doubling of CO2.

This number makes me skeptical that "decades" is a relevant time scale for this kind of melting; from the numbers above we're talking millennia. There just isn't enough heat flux around to do it faster.

In this connection, it's worth noting that the pictures we often see showing the variation in area of the ice sheet are misleading, since the key factor is not area but volume. The areas around the edge of the sheet that melt every summer and re-freeze every winter are the thinnest parts of the sheet, so the fractional change in area is larger (potentially much larger) than the fractional change in volume.

In between spending trillions and burying our head in the sand hoping that everything will just turn out OK (the Republican approach) there is a broad range of possibilities.

> we simply don't have the data to say that what we're seeing now is unprecedented

Ice core data goes back 800,000 years. What more do you want?

> The positive feedback loops are speculative

But plausible, and as I've pointed out before, the stakes are high. This is NOT something we want to find out the hard way.

> your argument seems to be that we should make huge efforts to reduce CO2 emissions

No, I never said that. All I've said is that we should take the problem seriously rather than pretend it doesn't exist. Donald Trump believes global warming is a hoax. It's not.

> creating wealth is positive sum

Only if you properly account for externalities. Markets are notoriously bad at that.

> but I don't think we have that accurate an understanding of what would happen

Again, this is not something we want to learn the hard way. By the time it becomes apparent that we can't grow crops in a +N degree world (for whatever value of N that happens to be true) it will be much (much!) too late to do anything about it.

> the Greenland ice sheet

The way we lose Greenland is not that it all melts. The way we lose it is that enough of it melts to destabilize it, and then the rest of it slides into the ocean still in the form of ice.

Ice core data doesn't tell us climate. It tells us temperature--with some error involved since it's an indirect reconstruction, and even more error due to the variation in data between different ice cores. Ice core data doesn't tell us the frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. It doesn't tell us the frequency of droughts, floods, bad crop years, etc. So it doesn't justify the strong claim that the climate change we are seeing now is unprecedented. At best it justifies the much weaker claim that the rate of temperature change we are seeing now might be unprecendented in this interglacial period.

All I've said is that we should take the problem seriously rather than pretend it doesn't exist.

Taking the problem seriously still leaves, as you note, a broad range of possibilities. But the political debate isn't talking about them. It's only talking about two options: panic or ignore. That's the problem with political debates: moderate positions like "we should take this seriously and look at a broad range of possible actions, and particularly look for actions that will benefit us no matter what happens and that we have other good reasons to do anyway" don't get discussed.

Only if you properly account for externalities. Markets are notoriously bad at that.

All the other methods of doing it are, on balance, worse. Also, the main limitation of markets in dealing with externalities is transaction costs (see Coase's Theorem), which are at least something that can be worked on. The main limitation of other methods of dealing with externalities is human politics; nobody knows how to fix that.

> we simply don't have the data to say that what we're seeing now is unprecedented

In terms of CO2 concentration we certainly do.

> But the political debate isn't talking about them. It's only talking about two options: panic or ignore.

No, that is absolutely not true. Many prominent Republicans (Trump among them) are certainly calling for the problem to be ignored. but I don't hear very many people on the other side calling for panic. Can you cite me even one example of a Democrat calling for panic?

> All the other methods of doing it are, on balance, worse.

We'll have to agree to disagree about that. I think government regulation can work just fine to control externalities. A carbon tax, for example, would go a long way towards fixing the problem. Even some Republicans are endorsing that idea.

No, it wasn't. We only care about CO2 concentration because of the belief that it affects the climate. If CO2 were going up but the climate weren't changing, nobody would care. So we can't just look at CO2 and say, well, that's unprecedented so we must have a problem. We have to look at whether the climate change itself is unprecedented. (For one thing, if the climate change we're seeing isn't unprecedented, even though the CO2 is, that tells us that the link between CO2 and climate change is not as strong as it is claimed to be.)

I don't hear very many people on the other side calling for panic.

To me, claiming that the only option we have for dealing with climate change is to spend trillions of dollars to stop emitting CO2 is panic. But I don't insist on that word; the key point is that only a very limited set of options is on the table. The Democrats are certainly not talking about building lots of nuclear reactors to replace fossil fuels, which is the option that looks like a no brainer to me.

I think government regulation can work just fine to control externalities.

Government regulation has done ok with some externalities in the past (such as regulating sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions). However, those were cases in which the actual externality could be quantified reasonably well, and the party that could fix the externality at the lowest cost was known. In a case like that, a tax basically just internalizes the externality.

Neither of those things are true of carbon. We don't have a good knowledge of the actual externality, so we don't know what the right level of tax is to impose. And we don't know who can actually fix the externality at lowest cost. Certainly the immediate impact of a carbon tax is not going to be aimed at the lowest cost fixers--the people who are going to take the hit are low income people who have no alternative to gasoline-powered cars to get to their jobs, whose gasoline expenditures will increase.

> If CO2 were going up but the climate weren't changing, nobody would care

Yes, obviously, but that's a straw man because you said you believed that climate change is happening. What do you think it causing it if it's not the CO2? Do you not believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas? Do you think it's just a coincidence that climate change coincides with industrial CO2 emissions?

> Neither of those things are true of carbon

Sure they are true. We know exactly where the carbon is coming from. It's coming from burning fossil fuels. So we can pick a target global emission level and increase the tax until actual emissions reach the target. It's very straightforward.

I already mentioned land use as another human effect. Another possible cause is natural variability. El Nino events cause heat transfer rates an order of magnitude larger than the radiative forcing due to a doubling of CO2. Nobody understands what causes El Ninos or can predict how their frequency might change in the future, and we have no data on how frequent they were in the past.

Do you not believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?

Of course CO2 is a greenhouse gas; we've measured its absorption spectrum in the lab.

Do you think it's just a coincidence that climate change coincides with industrial CO2 emissions?

Recent climate change also coincides with El Nino events--we had a huge one in 1998, and we're having another huge one now (and there have been others in between). We don't have good data on all El Nino events since the Industrial Revolution, but that's not the same as saying they didn't happen, or happened a lot less frequently. We don't know.

Also, as I've already said, we don't know that the climate was stable (i.e., varied a lot less than it is now) for the last 5 to 10 thousand years, and has only started to change at the same time as we started emitting CO2. We don't have enough data to make that strong claim. At best, we have data saying that the temperature change we are seeing now might be unprecedented over that time scale.

If your argument is "we don't know for sure what's causing the climate to change, but it could be CO2 so we should reduce emissions as a precaution", that's one thing. But the argument you started out with was "the science is clear: we know it's CO2". Which argument do you want to discuss?

we can pick a target global emission level and increase the tax until actual emissions reach the target.

Yes, but we can only pick a target emission level if we know the impact of different emission levels on the climate, accurately enough to judge the cost; it's the cost that's the externality, not the emission level. We don't know the impact of different emission levels on the climate accurately enough to do that.

@Ron:we can pick a target global emission level and increase the tax until actual emissions reach the target.

Actually, it's even more complicated than I thought in my last post, because the right target emission level depends on how much climate change cost is avoided by a given emission level, vs. the amount of tax that it takes to get to that emission level. You can't just pick a target and let the tax be whatever it takes to get there: that might result in paying more in tax than you are gaining in avoided climate change cost. You have to find a self-consistent solution for both variables (target emission level and tax) at once.

These articles look like a mixture of observations and gross misstatements. One of the latter that jumped out at me from the robertscribbler.com link was "With the pace of human warming now about 30 times faster than at the last ice age’s fall". If we approximate the current "pace of human warming" as 1 degree C/century, this statement would mean that the pace of warming at the end of the last ice age was 1 degree C/30 centuries, which is way too slow. Estimates of the pace of warming at the end of the Younger Dryas are at least as fast as the warming today (I've seen numbers an order of magnitude higher, but I don't know how well confirmed they are). The pace at the end of the more extended glacial period before that, which ended in the brief warm period before the Younger Dryas, also looks at least as fast as what we're seeing now.

From what I can gather from actual observations mentioned in the articles, it still looks like at least centuries for these events to play out. It also looks to me like, if the observations are taken at face value, the process of these two ice sheets flowing into the ocean, and the associated sea level rise, is already irreversible. So at the very least, if that is correct, we have no choice but to adapt to that level of sea level rise over a period of centuries. I would want to dig into the actual papers behind these articles, though--I really wish other disciplines besides physics and math would use arxiv.org or have a similar site to post preprints. We, the taxpayers, paid for all this research, so we should be able to freely access the results.

> If your argument is "we don't know for sure what's causing the climate to change, but it could be CO2 so we should reduce emissions as a precaution", that's one thing. But the argument you started out with was "the science is clear: we know it's CO2". Which argument do you want to discuss?

I think it's clear that it's the CO2, and the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree. *You* are the one who rejects the scientific consensus, labeling it "political" (what is your evidence for this BTW?) So yes, if I can convince you that reducing CO2 is a prudent precaution without convincing you that it's the CO2, I'll settle for that.

> we don't know that the climate was stable (i.e., varied a lot less than it is now) for the last 5 to 10 thousand years

Another straw man. The current round of warming is just getting started. So far we only have about 1 degree of warming, for which there is some historical precedent in the last 10k years. But what we are experiencing right now is (almost certainly) just the beginning.

If we could stop the current round of warming at 1 degree we would not be having this conversation, but we (almost certainly) can't. 2 degrees is probably the best we can hope for. And if people like you have their way, we won't achieve that either. So we're looking at 3, 4, 5, maybe even 6 degrees. That is not uncharted territory for the planet, but it is for human civilization.

@Ron:I think it's clear that it's the CO2, and the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree.

Which gets us right back to "we're not going to resolve this here". I simply don't share your confidence that the "scientific consensus" is good science, and I don't think either of us is going to be able to convince the other on that score within the confines of this discussion. The reasons for my lack of confidence are not quick knee-jerk reactions; I've been following this issue since roughly the turn of the millennium.

Also, given my own background in science, I am utterly unimpressed by claims like "the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree". I want to see the actual work, and over the years when I have dug into the details of various issues, I have found that the details do not back up the public claims that are made. In short, I don't have confidence that the "scientific consensus" has actually done its homework with the accuracy that would be needed to drive huge public policy decisions.

if I can convince you that reducing CO2 is a prudent precaution without convincing you that it's the CO2, I'll settle for that.

If we're going to just talk policy without trying to come to agreement on the reasons behind it, I would support the following policies:

- Put nuclear energy on an even footing with other energy sources; stop making it jump through hoops that no other energy source has to jump through. For bonus points, have the US government embark on some nuclear construction on its own account--for example, build a nuclear reactor for every military base in the 48 states, operated by a cadre of military personnel trained using the model of the Navy nuclear power program (which has been operating for decades without a single incident) and sell the excess power over what's needed to run the base back to the grid.

- Stop subsidizing particular food crops. (This and the next item are to address your concerns about crop failures causing political unrest.) The only thing the government should be doing with regard to food production is setting and enforcing safety standards. It has no business giving corporate welfare to agribusiness.

- Stop imposing extra costs on particular food imports. There's no reason for any kind of economic protectionism for US food production. This plus the last item, I would expect to significantly increase food production worldwide (which will consume more CO2), since the main effects of current US subsidies and import restrictions are to leave productive capacity unused.

- Start figuring out how to deal with sea level rise.

A carbon tax does not appear above, but if I were a politician and had to accept a carbon tax as part of a deal that got the other items above (particularly #1), I would make the deal.

@Ron:what we are experiencing right now is (almost certainly) just the beginning.

According to models which are already known to overpredict warming. In other words, your claim now is not that what we are experiencing--the data we have seen up to now for the current warming--is unprecedented (which is what you were claiming before), but that what is *predicted* to happen in the future will, *if* it happens, be unprecedented. But for that claim to be justified, we would have to have models with a predictive accuracy that our actual models do not have.

Bigger Than The Higgs Boson@Ron>"Over 650 economists, including five Nobel Prize winners and six past presidents of the American Economics Association, signed a statement stating that federal and state minimum wage increases 'can significantly improve the lives of low-income workers and their families, without the adverse effects that critics have claimed.'"

Well, those Nobel Prize winners better dust of their shelves, for they have another one coming. Discovering that increasing the price of something results in an increase in quantity demanded is an Earth-shattering discovery in microeconomic theory.

Think of what could be done with this theory! You raise the price of cars, and more cars are sold! You raise the price of pizza, and more pizza is sold!

It works the other way too! Decrease the price of gasoline, and less is used! If we gave it away for free, no one would use it! Think of the environmental benefits of that!

Perhaps there is one tiny little problem with this revolutionary microeconomic theory. Are you old enough to remember when1) Ushers at movie theaters escorted patrons to their seats?2) A gas station attendant pumped your gas for you, cleaned your windshield, checked your fluid levels, and checked your tires? 3) A Meter Reader came around your house to read the meters for electricity, water, and gas?4) A Milkman delivered dairy products to your house?5) Your dry cleaner would pick up and deliver to your house?

Let's skip to the conclusion on page 33:The major conclusion one should draw from this analysis is that the Seattle Minimum WageOrdinance worked as intended by raising the hourly wage rate of low-wage workers, yet theunintended, negative side effects on hours and employment muted the impact on labor earnings.

Uh-oh, just what where those unintended, negative side effects?". . . Yet, our best estimates find that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance appears to have lowered employment rates of low-wage workers.. . . Finally, we find only modest impacts on earnings. The effects of disemployment appear to be roughly offsetting the gain in hourly wage rates, leaving the earnings for the average low-wage worker unchanged."

They continue:

". . . We estimate that the impact of the Ordinance was a 1.1 percentage point decrease in likelihood of low-wage Seattle workers remaining employed.. . . Finally, for those who kept their job, the Ordinance appears to have improved wages and earnings, but decreased their likelihood of being employed in Seattle relative other parts of the state of Washington."

The study found that employment went down 1%, quarterly earnings by workers stayed about the same (due to less time worked), and an additional 1% of workers living in Seattle commuted out of Seattle for a job (rising from 2% to 3%).

Uh-oh: the price of labor increased, but the quantity demandeddecreased!

> Discovering that increasing the price of something results in an increase in quantity demanded is an Earth-shattering discovery in microeconomic theory.

Nobody was claiming this? Instead, the claim is that the demand for minimum-wage labor is inelastic. And there are a lot of studies which show this. What those studies also show, however, is that there is a shift in who is employed, toward people with better job skills. A result is that those less well-equipped to hold down jobs are less likely to get that crucial initial job experience (at low wage). Ostensibly there is training to offset this, but how often does that happen? So, the weakest and most vulnerable are harmed by minimum-wage legislation. However, you generally won't hear about this, because the Democrats do not need to claim all of the poor and weak as their constituency, but only enough. Screw the reast [in reality, vs. rhetoric].

In pretty much every MWI paper I've read, it is also carefully stated that mild increases in MW tend to keep inelasticity of demand in-place, because the thresholds for job-reduction haven't yet been hit. However, that may be changing, with machine learning finally hitting its stride in MW-job-threatening ways. With a high enough MW, a huge gap could be created between the employed and unemployed, making them increasingly unemployable. I rarely see this talked about. I wonder why.

You have made this claim a number of times now, and my current internet connection is too slow to really dig into it, but everything I've read indicates that the predictions have been pretty accurate to date:

> In other words, your claim now is not that what we are experiencing--the data we have seen up to now for the current warming--is unprecedented (which is what you were claiming before), but that what is *predicted* to happen in the future will, *if* it happens, be unprecedented. But for that claim to be justified, we would have to have models with a predictive accuracy that our actual models do not have.

The current levels of CO2 are unprecedented since before humans existed as a species. The current levels of temperature rise are not yet unprecedented, but if the models are correct then they very soon (by the end of this century) will also be unprecedented since human civilization has existed (10k years).

Based simply on first principles and the known fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it seems entirely plausible that an unprecedented concentration of CO2 will lead to unprecedented temperature increases over time. Moreover, given that you have already conceded that climate change is happening, the only thing we're really arguing over is the mechanism and the rate. So let me ask you: if it's not the CO2, what is it? And if it's not happening as fast as the models predict, how fast is it happening? And what is your basis for the answer to that question?

Yes, exactly. And there are two other reasons you can't treat labor like other commodities:

1. The production of labor does not obey market laws because labor is not produced to satisfy a profit motive, it is produced to satisfy sexual and familial urges hard-wired into people's brains by evolution.

2. It's a lot harder to dispose of excess labor than it is to dispose of excess production of inanimate commodities. When you have excess labor, you can't just put the surplus in a warehouse until it is needed.

This issue became political the moment its proponents changed its name from Global Warming to Global Climate Change.

>The way we lose Greenland is not that it all melts. The way we lose it is that enough of it melts to destabilize it, and then the rest of it slides into the ocean still in the form of ice.

That will be one heck of an iceberg. I predict it happens in 2018, when the Titanic II launches.

Now this guy thinks "As documented with enhanced melting of Greenland's ice sheet (jokalhaup etc.) we are looking at sea level increases of from 5'- 7' by 2050. See my previous posts on Greenland melting ice sheets."

> but I don't hear very many people on the other side calling for panic. Can you cite me even one example of a Democrat calling for panic?

How about every fucking one of them? Here is the proof from the 2016 <>Democratic Party Platform (page 45):"We believe the United States must lead in forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis. We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis."

The goal being "reducing greenhouse gas emissions more than 80 percent below2005 levels by 2050; . . ." (page 31). That's just great. Farmers can plow the fields with horses and the rest of us will live in cardboard boxes.

Well, except the corrupt Democrats. The platform committee voted down a fracking moratorium clause. Hmm . . . two members of the committee, Carol Browner and Wendy Sherman, work for the Albright Stonebridge Group -- which it turn owns 10% of a fracking services company, over 33% of the stock, and the right to put six members on the board of directors.

I suppose all democrats could be corrupt, which would falsify y my first statement.

The platform committee also voted down a clause calling for a carbon tax. How very Republican of them.

Finally the democratic platform has this:"Democrats also support efforts for self-governance and self-determination of Native Hawaiians"

@Luke>Instead, the claim is that the demand for minimum-wage labor is inelastic. And there are a lot of studies which show this.

Inelastic in the short term; more elastic in longer time frames. Plus some jobs just disappear (ushers, gas station attendants, ...)

@Ron>1. The production of labor does not obey market laws because labor is not produced to satisfy a profit motive, it is produced to satisfy sexual and familial urges hard-wired into people's brains by evolution.

This would be the supply.

>2. It's a lot harder to dispose of excess labor than it is to dispose of excess production of inanimate commodities.

Not the business owner's problem?

>When you have excess labor, you can't just put the surplus in a warehouse until it is needed.

Which is why the government shouldn't enact policies that reduce employment.

@Peter>- Stop subsidizing particular food crops. (This and the next item are to address your concerns about crop failures causing political unrest.) The only thing the government should be doing with regard to food production is setting and enforcing safety standards. It has no business giving corporate welfare to agribusiness.

Farming is an example of market failure. Farmers are price-takers. This gives them slim profits and no buffer against disaster.

A shortage of food is also unlike a shortage of, say, Iphones. A shortage of food is called a famine. Food is always something you want to have a surplus of.

This is, of course, Ron's global warming argument, but for food. The difference is that we are absolutely certain what happens without food.

It is if the business owner takes the position that the free market is the right answer to this problem.

> > When you have excess labor, you can't just put the surplus in a warehouse until it is needed.

> Which is why the government shouldn't enact policies that reduce employment.

Touche. But the problem, of course, is that employment not the end, it's the means. The end is an equitable distribution of available resources. A job is not just a way to make people produce, it's a way for them to exchange their labor for other things of value. If people working full time don't make enough to afford the basic necessities of life then you have not solved the problem even if everyone has a job.

> Inelastic in the short term; more elastic in longer time frames. > Plus some jobs just disappear (ushers, gas station attendants, ...)

I'm just reporting what the vast majority of MWI studies show. Apparently, jobs such as movie theater ushers and gas station attendants weren't numerous enough, or were a one-time phenomenon which generally has not repeated.

Now, as I said in my comment, what "the vast majority of MWI studies show" is (i) more than what is generally reported; (ii) true only under certain conditions. Perhaps Seattle is at a distance sufficiently far away from the "domain of validity" of those studies for the results to be statistically significant.

It may help to note that because increases in MWI [of the kind which have been historically executed] don't actually have that big of an impact on business, it's one law that Republicans are generally willing to support—in lieu of more drastic measures.

And I gave a link supporting it. The two links Publius gave are also relevant.

I'll take a look at the links you posted. One obvious difference just on a quick look is that the article I linked to (and at least the first one Publius linked to) is talking about the general circulation models that predict atmospheric temperatures, while the articles you linked to are talking about models that predict ocean heat content.

The current levels of CO2 are unprecedented since before humans existed as a species.

That has been true, at least if we use the ice core data to fix the "before humans existed as a species" level, for more than a century now. So by your argument, we shouldn't have to depend on models at this point to predict that we will get unprecedented temperature rise Real Soon Now; we should already have been seeing it for a while.

if it's not the CO2, what is it?

I've already given two possibilities.

if it's not happening as fast as the models predict, how fast is it happening?

Atmospheric temperatures have been rising slower than the extreme low end of the range of all the GCM models. And that comparison actually understates the model error, because the full model range that is always shown in the graphs includes three sets of models which are based on three different assumptions about CO2 levels. Since at most one of those assumptions about CO2 levels can end up actually happening, only one of the three sets of models is actually relevant for comparison with the data. The model set whose CO2 level assumptions most closely match the data is the one that assumed the largest rise in CO2 levels; and the low end of that set is significantly more than the actual temperature rise. That means those models are already falsified by the data.

The above is the only real comparison we can make between models and data, but for what it's worth, here is a quick overview of other aspects of climate:

We only have decent ocean heat content data for the last decade or so (the Argo buoys reached the initial planned deployment in 2007), at least for some value of "decent". (The buoys only descend to 2000 meters, so any coverage below that is much spottier even now.) That's too short a time to say much about rate of change.

What data we have on hurricanes and tornadoes does not show any significant change over time; there are fluctuations from year to year but the long-term trend is basically zero.

@Publius:Farming is an example of market failure. Farmers are price-takers. This gives them slim profits and no buffer against disaster.

That's what speculators are for. In a free market farmers routinely hedge by selling futures, which are bought by speculators; the farmers then have an incentive to produce as much as the speculators will buy, which will tend to closely track their productive capacity (see next sentence for why). The speculators are the ones who have to buffer themselves; they do so by diversifying and by spreading buying and selling over time; in bumper crop years, they buy more and store it, so they can sell it at a profit in leaner years.

Government subsidies negate this system by giving farmers more of an incentive not to produce than speculators can give them to produce. The result is unused capacity. Yes, the farmers' income is still ok, since it's subsidized; but that just means the rest of us are paying the same money for less food.

Food is always something you want to have a surplus of.

Then the government, if it is simply unwilling to let speculators and the free market take care of that, should be doing what the speculators would do: buying the surplus in bumper crop years, at market rates (or buying futures at the market rates for those, which, as above, is better for the farmers), and storing it, and then selling it, at market rates, in leaner years. The government should certainly *not* be paying farmers *not* to grow surplus food.

@Ron:The production of labor does not obey market laws because labor is not produced to satisfy a profit motive, it is produced to satisfy sexual and familial urges hard-wired into people's brains by evolution.

You're confusing motivation with economic action. Yes, the *reason* people want to produce things using their labor is so they can use them, or trade them for things they can use, and the ways they use them ultimately have nothing to do with profit; they are just brute facts of human nature. (This is true, btw, even if the ultimate uses are not hard-wired by evolution but are learned.) But that does not mean that, when making choices about how much to produce, how much of their labor to expend, people do not obey market laws. At most, people have a constraint, a minimum amount of production that they need to survive, support their family, etc. But constraints like that are easily modeled using microeconomics.

No, the end is to *create* wealth via productive activities and positive sum trades. If all you're doing is "distributing available resources", you've already lost.

The key issue with labor is what you were sort of getting at with your comment about not being able to store it: namely, that you can't create more of it. Everyone only has 24 hours in a day, minus unavoidable time for personal maintenance, and once each day is gone it's gone. The only room for tradeoff at all is between labor and leisure. That is what makes labor fundamentally different from capital and from most other goods, which *can* be created (and stored).

If people working full time don't make enough to afford the basic necessities of life then you have not solved the problem even if everyone has a job.

But since you can't create more labor (because you can't create more time), the only way to fix this problem is to increase productivity, i.e., to create more capital. Passing a minimum wage law does not do anything to increase productivity. And a large piece of that new capital will be human capital, i.e., increasing the skills of people. Minimum wage laws don't do anything to help with that either.

In other words, minimum wage laws set a requirement without doing anything to make it achievable. Kind of like taxing carbon without doing anything to give people an alternative, like building lots of nuclear reactors.

> No, the end is to *create* wealth via productive activities and positive sum trades.

Well, it's both. If you start from a situation where 5 people have 10 units of wealth each and 5 others have 20 units, and move to a situation where everyone has 5 units of wealth, that is not a good outcome despite the fact that it's more equitable. On the other hand, if you move from that situation to one where 9 people have 1 unit of wealth and 1 person has 500 units, that is not a good outcome either, despite the fact that average wealth has gone up.

If you have a situation where large numbers of people working full time cannot support a family, IMHO that is not a good outcome no matter how well off the elites are. But free markets tend towards outcomes like this because they tend to amplify -- and hence entrench -- disparities in negotiating power.

This -- and the climate change issue -- deserve posts of their own. It may be a while before I can get to that.

@Peter>That's what speculators are for. In a free market farmers routinely hedge by selling futures, which are bought by speculators; the farmers then have an incentive to produce as much as the speculators will buy, which will tend to closely track their productive capacity

Forward contracts, futures, and options can transfer the price risk from farmers to others in the short term. However, they don't help with long-term price movements. In 2013, a bushel of corn was selling for $7.00; in 2016, a bushel of corn is selling for $3.82. There is no guarantee that the spot price, or any future price, will be at a price level that is profitable to the farmer. Indeed, one would predict significant periods where farming is usually unprofitable.

>The speculators are the ones who have to buffer themselves; they do so by diversifying and by spreading buying and selling over time; in bumper crop years, they buy more and store it, so they can sell it at a profit in leaner years.

With this system, I would enslave every farmer. Then I would buy their farms for a song. After that, I would sell my farm products at high monopoly prices.

Note that Asia speculators in frozen shrimp have 3 years of shrimp in freezers. They use this to insure that shrimp farmers make as little as possible.

>Then the government, if it is simply unwilling to let speculators and the free market take care of that, should be doing what the speculators would do: buying the surplus in bumper crop years, at market rates (or buying futures at the market rates for those, which, as above, is better for the farmers), and storing it, and then selling it, at market rates, in leaner years.

You weren't around in the 80's, or were very young, weren't you? Back then the USDA had a million pounds of cheese in refrigerated storage. Storing all that cheese, and other surplus foods, cost a lot money. This led President Reagan to give it away, via the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. The U.S. has done this kind of invervention storage, through the Commodity Credit Corporation. Storage works well for farm products that can be stored -- as long as the cost of storage doesn't get too high.

The largest cost of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Act_of_2014>the latest farm bill</a> is food stamps (now SNAP) - $756 over 10 years. Crop insurance is $90 billion, conservation $56 billion, and commodity programs at $44 billion. Divide by 10 and add up, it's about $20 billion a year directly to farmers. The grocery stores are always full.

@Publius:In 2013, a bushel of corn was selling for $7.00; in 2016, a bushel of corn is selling for $3.82.

Yes, because in between, the government stopped subsizing ethanol from corn, because it had an epiphany and realized that burning food causes a shortage of food.

There is no guarantee that the spot price, or any future price, will be at a price level that is profitable to the farmer.

How do you know $3.82 a bushel for corn isn't profitable? And if it isn't for one particular farmer, what stops him from either making his farm more efficient or selling it to someone who can? At least, that's what will happen in a free market. But if the farmer is getting subsidized by the government, he has no incentive to become more efficient--so again, all of us pay the same money for less food.

one would predict significant periods where farming is usually unprofitable.

Because of variations in weather and other factors that humans can't control, yes. And government subsidies don't magically change any of that. All they do is ensure that less food is produced during the times when it *is* profitable, so there is less (or no) surplus to help us through the leaner times.

The grocery stores are always full.

In the US, yes. That's because there is considerable excess food production capacity in the US, so our grocery stores can stay full even with the inefficiencies imposed by the US government.